Robot Design

Last year, we had a robot that had two wheels in the front and a castor at the back. A medium motor was high. The ultrasonic sensor was front bottom.  \There was a color sensor underneath. This robot was based on Damien Kee's book Programming for the Classroom Activities for the Busy EV3 Teacher. Great book BTW.

We scored 100 pts. on or best run at regionals last year which was 6 out of 12. Not bad, but we can do better.

Things I liked about this robot:
1. Beginning students had instructions for building it.
2. It was easy to make modifications to the basic design.
3. It was small and maneuverable.
4. The kids understood it.

Things that I didn't like about this robot:
1. The castor would bounce off/on the table and make a clunking noise. Did this effect the moving accuracy?
2. We had robot path accuracy issues. Some paths weren't repeatable each time with enough accuracy to score.
3. The robot wasn't square; we didn't try to bounce off walls to make sure we stayed lined up.

The teams that we saw with high scores and performing well made use of fancier attachments than we we used.  Those robots also had a "guard" all the way around it that allowed it to square up on walls.

With those points in mind, I tried to find some pictures of robots on the internet that looked like what I think we should go with this year.

Sorry the source of these photos is missing here in the blog, but you can find them off my FLL Robot Design board on Pinterest.

Several of these robots have the medium motor mounted lower center front flush with the guard.  Others use gears that turn angles to mount it higher and farther back but still get the job done. Note that the touch sensor can be mounted farther back, if you use an axle to do the touching, which sticks out of the front of it.  Some of these robots have 4 wheels or 2 wheels and use the guard to keep the robot level. The brick can be mounted front to back, left to right, or even on it's side.

And here's some code showing how to back the robot into a wall to line it up. Unfortunately the resolution on the image makes it too small to read.